Confession: I live in the middle of radish fields, and the only movie theater plays nothing but "Smash and Boom III" and "Tyler Perry Presents Loud and Noisy." Consequently, I will sound like a moron if I talk about Spike Jonze's film, "Her." I will, therefore, instead, talk about reviews of the film and the premise of the film and hope that I don't so mangle things that it invalidates my commentary.
Tentatively, therefore, I want to propose the following: "Her" plays upon the Classical myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, and yet it does so in such an attenuated and developed way that reviewers either miss the model or do not bring it up. This mythic structure has a great deal to offer us, both in terms of a contemplation of art and the powers of humanity, chaos, love, creativity, and, indirectly, politics. In its Classical form, it's a perfect love, but for us it is a story of the power of art and obsession.
The story occurs in Ovid's Metamorphoses X, in one of the Orphic songs. You can read a translation here. The song is very, very short, and the tale is very evocative. Pygmalion is a sculptor who is, in some versions, very ugly. In all versions he is very skilled. He makes a sculpture of a woman whom he could love -- the perfect girl. In Orpheus's version, she is chaste by virtue of her marble-whiteness ("whiteness" is code rather than the assumed skin color of women). He loves the sculpture so much that he wants no real woman for a bride. At one point or another, Venus/Aphrodite turns the statue -- Galatea -- into a real woman.
The Victorians inherited the story from the later Romantics -- in particular Rousseau -- and they loved the story. W. S. Gilbert did a version, and G. B. Shaw (yes, yes, a Modern in . . . and yet not) did the famously class-based satire Pygmalion that became the rather denatured My Fair Lady. Of course Rousseau's reflected the later-Romantic fascination with the limitations of creativity, and this would show up in pictorial treatments by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
For the artists of the turn of the 19th - 20th century, the theme seemed to be the power of imagination, and the dangers of fascination. "The Lady of Shalott" is, in some ways, a mirror of Pygmalion: that which can be imagined can be beautiful, but realizing it brings danger. Their versions of Galatea, like other products of artistic imagination, inevitably transferred human stains or impossibility when they crossed into reality. Either the human malleability of the lover or the demands of perfection would, like Frankenstein or Mr. Hyde, show the impossibility of the perfect more than they would affirm the value of the real.
The new "Her" would not be the first use of the Pygmalion theme with technology. We have a long, long, long line of silly and crude efforts, from 1970's science fiction fear films about super computers to standing jokes in comedy shows ("Mannequin") and thoughtful meditations such as "Lars and the Real Girl" (which shouldn't really be in a list like this because there is no actual loving of the object). "Colossus: The Forbin Project" from 1970 set the tone for the "Oh my gosh, it has taken over the world, because we're not logical enough," but "Demon Seed" had the best creep factor, especially with the explicit (at the end) Pygmalion/Galatea dynamic, with poor Julie Christie being the unwilling model. For the silly, we get everything from "Weird Science" (super models from a Tandy TRS 80!) to "War Games" (yes, it's silly, and the Galatea is the non-geek girlfriend).
"Futurama" had a great time with the social scourge of "robosexuality." In one episode, it was a way of discussing the hysteria and vacuity of Proposition 8's anti-homosexuality. The show even had Hubert Farnsworth do a parody of the self-parodying "storm clouds" ad from the National Organization for Marriage ("nom nom nom"). In another episode, though, Fry downloads his own Lucy Liu-bot. To discourage him, Professor Farnsworth shows him a government propaganda film, I Dated a Robot! (If you haven't seen it, you should click on the link, as it's one of the finest bits of parody in the show's history.)
For a legitimate enactment of Pygmalion and Galatea, where the theme's danger and wickedness brings potential culpability or unforeseen implications, literary fiction had a flirtation with
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers in 1995. It is a very well written novel with extremely fine style and control. The "Galatea" of the title is, ostensibly, an effort at natural learning for an AI. Computer scientists are going to attempt AI by having a vast neural net learning associatively and interrogatively, the way that children do. The neuroscience and AI in the novel are quite good, but the real Galatea of the novel is the writer's own wife, who breaks away from him in the course of the book, having an affair as the marriage breaks down.
Galatea is every beloved.
Men are pretty obvious as they attempt to "make" their mates. Young men insist on rewriting their girlfriends' musical tastes, or books, or sports affiliations. (Neil LaBute plays assure us that women attempt to make their mates, too. "Training" boyfriends and teaching them to dress properly is part of the sculpting women may do.) In a sense, we all believe we sculpt what we love. However, the story of Pygmalion ends in the Orphic lay too soon. After Venus gives the gift comes the problem of living love in contrast to adoration, for what is perfect only remains perfect if people are immobile or manage to move together.
The Shaw Pygmalion has to understand that his Galatea may not remain an experiment, that language does not remake the person, that class is or is not simply a disguise (it's not clear). (This ambiguity is gone in "My Fair Lady.") She does not marry Higgins and is only alive when her spirit is free.
Pygmalion is, in a sense, a rape fantasy, and every artist realizes that the power differential in it cannot coexist with love. If Aphrodite makes the created give love always, then "she" may be admirable, but unlovable for its creator. "She" becomes an accessory to desire and an extension of the sculpting self. If, on the other hand, "she" loves, then love implies independence, which includes needs and surpluses -- times when she requires what she lacks and times or qualities that she possesses that he does not seek. Therefore, when artists dwell on the story, they inevitably include the sadness of attainment (best case) or the realization that the desire for Galatea is evil.
In short, the story of Pygmalion comes to be a theme that reflects the faith we have in human creativity. It can even, in the hands of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, reflect on the general theme of Creation itself (and why humanity would be allowed evil in order to be capable of being lovable by its creator). How much faith do we have that the things we make can be good?
The early Modernists had a strain of rejecting reality and positing beauty only outside of the actual. W. B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" posits a reality of art that is parallel to the reality of daily experience. It might emanate from artworks, but it isn't coexisting. T. S. Eliot would argue for a Christian mystic experience that is, again, separate, superior, informing, but away from the quotidian, where all paths lead to the same place, and the place is not any one physical place.
For Yeats, artistic wholeness and perfection is ever receding and ideal -- like Plato's ideal world, only glimpsed -- as a parallel reality. Those of us who had his theory of "gyres" inflicted upon us in a Modern Poetry class will have realized that he imagines a sort of story or narrative that repeats on an ideal plane that spins above and astride reality. (The person(s) behind this site take it very seriously.) T. S. Eliot, on the other hand, moves Symbolist language about transcending images onto the traditional Christian mysticism. For him, God's history is dependent upon "rightness of time" (kairos) rather than additions and sequences, and moments of complete transcendence (the Incarnation, Epiphany, etc.) break between the eternal and the actual, but the real and actual history never becomes perfect -- that is reserved for God's truth.
For pre-war (World War II) thinkers, it was failure. If we wanted love, it would be found in private moments, not lives. If we wanted functioning systems, they would be in the visions that inspired our plans, but not our plans themselves. The Victorians and early Modernists were living in a world where empire had shown Western aspirations and appetites in action on a global scale. Whether the Belgian Congo or the British Raj, the best practices had resulted in atrocities, repression, and oppression. Appetite had triumphed over planning. For the Modernists, the high minded belief in progress had smashed into World War I, when the most "civilized" nations on earth had used chemical weapons against each other.
After the second world war, such gloom may have been out of fashion, or it may have mutated under the weight of the single, inescapable fact of The Bomb. Certainly the great "In Praise of Limestone," by W. H. Auden makes the case, profoundly, that mutability is perfection. His version of the crisis of Pygmalion is to denounce the artist as a traitor and to praise the ever-changing landscape of time and memory as the true landscape of beauty. (If you haven't read the poem, please do.)
Our intellectuals of the 1960's seem to have split away from the question altogether. Some have dismissed the very endeavor. Because such questions fall into speculation and essence, intellectuals miss their metaphoric value and kicked them to the curb in favor of pragmatic matters. On the other hand, some had localized the failure in power or the state, leaving it possible to have the perfect art, the perfect realization, so long it was rooted consensus or made a claim only to one place and time.
I find it odd, though, that we are even able to reiterate Pygmalion and Galatea with innocence today. It is even stranger that technology has allowed us to have a sort of parallel meditation, where we can convince ourselves that Frankenstein is about "technology" and that it is possible to talk about "computers" and "systems" without discussing the impulses and brains that are entangled with them.
Are we stuck reiterating the tragedy of love alone, or has the serial failure of Iraq, Afghanistan -- not to mention Honduras, Nicaragua and other places where American best practices have been at work -- taught us skepticism about projecting human will and trusting our planning? Surely it is the fate of love, just as love itself, to be lashed to humans who do not live in sync, but is it in the realm of any human creation to breathe without carrying with it the stain of its creators?
If our telling of Pygmalion/Galatea only says that beauty exists fleetingly outside of the grasp of the mind, then we do not add much, although we might teach endlessly. It's true that the American public is cynical: we assume that no one believes in an ideal, including the architects of the neo-liberal invasion of Iraq, but just crossing our fingers behind our back -- swearing that we didn't really mean it when we said that we thought we were making the world a better place -- does not absolve us from having done our best when we made the mess. We, with our brand names and bumper stickers attached, sent troops to destroy and enforce governments. We, with our right wing radio telling us that Jesus was involved, did what we said we believed what was right and good.
We, with very sincere dreaming in print, made the Internet, opened it to the .com's, sold domains, and preached freedom. We created the world that spies on us in order to sell us pregnancy supplies before our daughters have missed their second periods. We created the super-intelligent super intelligence agents in our action movies, and now the 4th amendment is unknown.
I am going to see "Her" as soon as I am able -- probably by purchasing the film from Amazon, which already knows I want it -- but I may agree with Charlie Kaufman that it sounds like a scary thing to me.